- As Western culture, especially in the Northeast, we think of death as this horrible thing, and we pretend like it's not happening, when really it can be just a beautiful, peaceful transition.

♪ Lay down your burden, let it go ♪ ♪ Lay down your burden, let it go ♪ ♪ You're pure love now ♪ ♪ You are pure grace ♪ ♪ Lay down ♪ - I am a classical musician, and I have been working as such for close to 25 years, and have always sung at funerals.

There must be some way to support people before you get to say a celebration of life or a funeral.

A threshold choir is a group of volunteers who learn a very specific kind of repertoire to sing at bedside for those who have entered palliative care or perhaps hospice care.

It's a secular organization that helps people who are transitioning at the end of their life.

And it supports not only the patient in the bed, but those who are supporting that person at bedside, as well as celebrating the life once they have fully transitioned.

Threshold Choir was started by a really amazing woman named Kate Munger, and it was born out of the HIV/AIDS crisis.

She was caring for friends who were transitioning, and she discovered after the cooking and cleaning was done and you went to go sit by bedside and hold someone's hand, she really didn't know what to do, and so she started singing.

- I've been a singer in choirs all my life at church and in the course of Westerly, I have done it naturally.

When someone's been on the threshold, I just go to their bedside and sing on my own, I didn't know there was an organized way of doing it.

It's such a gift, and it's a gift for the singer and for the recipient.

- We each get into our Threshold Choir chair and offer ourselves up to be that vulnerable, and then feel uplifted by the songs that we sing.

- There's one song we sing, I always think of the people in Ukraine when we sing it, it's called "Weight of the World."

♪ When the weight of the world gets heavy ♪ ♪ And trouble flows in like the tide ♪ ♪ May we stand up and help each other ♪ ♪ Find comfort when love abides ♪ - The first time we sang it, it brought tears to my eyes, all of us will cry during rehearsal because they're just so moving.

♪ Heavy, and trouble ♪ - The art of being together, choirs kind of have this secret about them, that it's a place where 100 different agendas, 100 different days, 100 different tomorrows can all rest in the same room.

And we all take a corporate breath and we sing the same notes and the same words and can reach a common understanding.

Threshold Choir distills that down to a single page, and it gives you the space to just be together and go, "Yeah, that's really tough, but it's worthwhile."

And the grief that you feel, even when it's painful, can be a very beautiful thing.

♪ Find comfort when love abides ♪ Thank you.